


Temperance

by YawningOverTheTapestries



Series: Projecting Trait and Trace [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pre-Slash, pre-into darkness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-02-27 22:48:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2709521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YawningOverTheTapestries/pseuds/YawningOverTheTapestries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vulcans have daemons too: that’s the mantra Kirk repeats to himself – or rather, Erinys repeats to him, in odd moments when the ‘soulless’ reputation of the Vulcan psyche shows itself. Vulcan daemons aren’t like human ones, this much is true, but neither Spock nor Cassandro is an even mix of two halves.</p><p>It turns out; it takes the catching of a man who’s been frozen for centuries, with a daemon doing some of the most disturbing things they’ve ever witnessed, for Kirk to realise: the soul may be subtle, but it’s not what makes someone malicious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The genesis of this fic - hopefully the first in a series - came in a dream, and I found myself watching STID all over again, to see if it could work. To see if the story could incorporate daemons.
> 
> I hope I don't get hate mail from die-hard Trekkies for getting anything wrong! I've never written Spirk before, so don't be too harsh on me...

The sky is flawlessly clear, so the sun turns it a brilliant shade of bright carmine red far into the western horizon, like blood splashed over the glowing mountains. Beyond, it fades to lavender and ink-black, stars beginning to emerge one by one, far into the depth of the open air so it seems to go on for thousands and thousands of miles… because it does. The wilderness spreads and stretches as if it could encompass the entire world.  Erinys sprays sand left and right, as she sprints joyously beside the motorbike – her bleached ochre furred body lost in a swathe of yellow.

They seem to be alone, the only life in the desert, marred by the dull dark shapes of scaffolding and bits of machinery.

 

The human, to whom the daemon belongs, is young and adventurous, and his future is literally ahead of him. The USS Enterprise sits above their heads in the sky, like a huge metallic leviathan practically suspended in the air, unfinished but already set to take off, gleaming in her newness, poised before the constellation of Cassiopeia – normally she sits as an upside-down capital W, with Andromeda nestled close beside. James Kirk has stopped, taken off his helmet and is sat on the sand. It’s cooling off as the day draws to a close, and he couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. Erinys can’t stray far, so she comes careering back to her human to sit beside him, dust billowing into a fine mist.

 

“Wow… looks wicked, doesn’t it? ‘S not going to be stuck here much longer, Erin.”

 _Canis latrans._ She looks like she was born here. Whining softly, she brushes her tapered muzzle against his arm. Kirk gives her head a scratch behind her ears, ruffling the fur on the loose scruff at the back of her neck, all tinged saffron with a layer of dust. Her long legs fold down under her as she lies down, and starts panting contentedly. Kirk laughs lightly to himself; he can still remember how Christopher Pike badgered him to sign up, how he wondered if it would be worth it – he was _so_ right. And his wolf-daemon would push her silvery head against Erinys’ shoulder, taller and leaner and more powerful than the smaller coyote-daemon, playful and boisterous. She’s had more experience of Starfleet, and should know what she’s doing. Both of them are dogs, wild dogs, sharing some kind of mutual kinship. Pike can see something special in Kirk, and the young scrap wants to prove him right, and make him and everyone else proud.

His ship is breathtaking, and beautiful, and seeing her against the backdrop of the sky she’ll be ready to explore very soon, floods Kirk and Erinys with more of that fierce excitement.

They remain on the sandy plains for hours, their wanderings being drawn behind them in long serpentine tyre-prints, and smudging, fleeting pawprints. Winona did give her son a fair amount of freedom, while still being as protective as anyone’s parents ought to be. Since what sadly happened to George, aboard the _Kelvin_ , Starfleet seemed to be spun into the future of the boy he left behind. He had destiny on his side, and the hope of freedom beckoned him on. The desert seems to epitomize all that is freedom, the kind of endless, triumphant happy freedom that he wants more of, the more he gets.

There really can’t be anything, anywhere, that offers more limitless a feeling, than space.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

It seems to be a comfort, the image of this world. The hard limestone, worn smooth and bleached mottled-white by the wind and the sun, the enormous mass of it all heaped on the red earth, baked into a dry, rich, thick crust with cracks running deep into it, some for over a mile. Vulcan languishes, under a sun that feels like it burns too close to the surface of the planet. At first glance, the wilds separating the far-spaced cities seem completely deserted, but, with a closer look, it’s littered with life.

Wiry brown roots cling to the thinner cracks between earth and rock, and fatty tubers poke their bristled heads above the ground. Midges swarm in the hot air. Tiny basking creatures sit spread-eagled on flat orange rocks, at once motionless and tensely alert, ready to vanish in a puff of floury sand if anything disturbs them. The long, narrow, steel-blue tops of the heads of creatures cluster in the shade of one of the widest crevices. They’re waiting out the hottest hours of the day, before they emerge to browse on the sparse things growing. It’d be hardly appropriate to call them animals: they congregate in little groups, constantly chattering to one another, buzzing with a quiet vibrant energy, so they could be thought of as people. Watching the climbers for long enough, a few things can be noticed: they spend the day on the limestone face, and they sleep in crevices, only two or three metres off the ground, carefully chosen for being in shade for the majority of the day. These ones can be distinguished, as running down the cliff, reaching towards their entrances, are roots braided and weathered into a thick rope.

The climbers have bodies like staghorn coral, all long tubular limbs and branching appendages, lithe and agile, specialized for just hanging off the rough vertical surface. Their hands are flat and wide, the fingers widely spaced, three on the front and four on the back, with stubby claws. Their slim jaws have a row of teeth inside like pegs, and the protective sheen on their orange eyes gives them a strange greenish tinge.

 

The picture recedes and fades. There’s much more to see; how the climbers cannot twist roots or push a rock out of the earth without another to help; how a team can work systematically with their hands and jaws, stirring earth looking for whatever looks tasty, and once they’ve eaten their fill they’ll take more food down to the higher apartments, where it’s at a temperature to dry them out and preserve them; how the sand is burning hot and perfectly dry because of how it rains only a few days each year; how, with a good enough tread in their feet, one could climb up those limestone masses and see through the clear day, ShiKahr sparkling in the distance like a mirage… Cassandro cannot sleep, so cannot bring any more dreams. His dark supple body drops from the top of the bedpost, and climbs onto Spock’s still shoulders, one limb after another. A long face rests over his chest and the end of his muzzle sits atop his clasped hands.

It’s not right. The reason why cannot be summed up in one sentence, but it’s not right. Yet, like this, it’s okay.

 

Spock isn’t restless. There’s just a melancholy quiet in his eyes, and he draws in a long silent unhurried breath, and back out, so Cassandro can surf and spread his hands to steady himself, rather than simply rest. Spock makes no move to touch his daemon. This is enough, when they’ve been dreaming of black holes and mutiny and being tangled in two worlds and two lives. Vulcans are much more few and far between than they have been before, but their endangered status is nothing compared to _Sophro’yn_. They may be sentient, but they can’t fly themselves off a planet, and now the only wild ones left still alive are the breeding populations scattered across the rest of the quadrant.

If Vulcans still could grasp the rather antiquated idea of gods, they might think there’s something special about _Sophro’yn_ , how they seem to be intelligent, without being related to people of some description.

 

“I cannot see any definitive meaning to it.” Spock says flatly into the dark. Cassandro feels it too. It’s well within his ability to feel it for both of them.

“You can’t rush it. When one loses something that filled a substantial part of their life, it takes time to reestablish the order of everything else.”

“I understand, but that does not make it much easier.”

 

Amanda used to tell her son about animals on Earth, and this would turn into a conversation of questions about how, hypothetically, a person would know about creatures they’d never seen in the flesh, and what would happen hence, if they saw a daemon take the form of one. Surely the argument would span creatures from planets half a galaxy away.

Vulcans have taught themselves a sobriety towards the lively shape shifting that daemons of other peoples often show. There’s a careful balance of the _katra_ – essence of spirit, that makes up the soul, along with a daemon – shared by the two parties, and Vulcan daemons must respect that. Over time, they all took the forms of _Sophro’yn_ , some of them even settling a few hours after being born. Sarek had modest hopes for his son’s daemon, though he knew it wouldn’t be right to let sentiment cloud his logic.

Cassandro took his adult form promptly enough, but ended up with stripes banded round his legs, in the delicate brown of the plumage of Amanda’s daemon, a freckled dove. Now most of the Enterprise crew can’t look at Cassandro without a sick feeling rising up.

 

“I don’t feel I can trust what I do not completely know.”

Cassandro wishes he could be a better reassurance, if Spock would accept it. “There’s nothing bad about feeling like that. A lot of people do. More than you would expect.”

 

The words different cultures have for soul may be artificial, but the soul itself can’t be, surely. And when the traditional idea of it clashes with the learned reason that Vulcans value so much, it’s even worse. No wonder nobody seems to have the guts to talk to Spock about grief.


	2. Chapter 2

“Cassie? Caaaaassie… ?” Erinys paws at the iced white glass door sealing the room from the outside world. Her soft whines carry clean through it, the scraping of her claws echoing the soft tap of what sounds like a leather-bound bill, broader than any bird’s beak, tapping gently at the glass at the top of the door, absent-mindedly, like its owner is contentedly watching the occupants inside.

“I know it’s you… ” Kirk looks up momentarily, and pulls a grin in her direction.

“You’re the biggest of all the climbing daemons of all the crew, and flying daemons need to spend only a bit of time above ground at a time, so they don’t mess with the gravity settings. Cassie?” She sits back and bays like a tiny siren.

“Leave the Vulcansaurus alone, Erin. Come and proof read – and this time, please actually read what I’ve written before thinking it’s completely wrong and tearing my face off.” Kirk chides her cheerily; he’s not really concentrating on anything, except what he’s just finished writing, and he stares at it, half-satisfied, and also completely sure it’s not right. He has a pretty good idea how Admiral Pike and the rest of the top dogs back home at Starfleet will interpret it all.

Erinys abandons the door and trots over to him, stretching up to pop her paws on his lap. It’s not perfect, but a good enough vantage point to see what he’s written. “Wha – no, Jim, you can’t file that!”

“Really?” In the back of his mind he was expecting that response from her.

“Pike will lose it if he finds out you let everyone drop Spock into a spewing lava fountain.”

Kirk scrolls through it, his brow furrowed as he squints at the flowing words. She’s right, but he hates the idea of the great crazy heroic epic acts of the Enterprise crew (of _his_ ) being confined solely to memory.

But Erinys is right. If he can’t rely on her to be the voice of reason, or tell him what would make sure he would be doing the right thing, he can’t rely on anyone. She shoves her muzzle hard into his thigh, all soft cold nose and fuzzy drooping ears, her eyes as startling blue as his own, while heart-meltingly manipulative… Kirk chuckles at her and rubs his knuckles into her long scrubby fur. “I know, right, don’t worry. You could stop armies with the puppy-dog eyes – what everyone doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”

“So are you going to leave it?”

“I’ll crop it down.”

 

 

Being James Kirk’s daemon means you’d have to not be naïve as much as possible, because he can say something that doesn’t properly round off the conversation with a nice warm feeling, that nothing unsavoury will result from him and his actions – the full version of their latest report didn’t get published, but it still resided on the Enterprise system, until Spock found it. Erinys feels horrible when the cat gets let out of the bag – when Pike wants to have a word with Kirk and Spock, it gets _very_ bad _very_ quickly.

Pike’s wolf-daemon bares her huge teeth at Erinys, fur bristling, the growl almost too deep for anyone to hear. Erinys can practically feel it in the floor, crouching low and head tilted away in remorse. She knows Cassandro remains in his customary position, perched on Spock’s left shoulder, which hardly seems fair, but that’s just from her point of view. All she wanted to do was make sure her dear human would do what would be right, but it goes wrong every so often, and it seems even more impossible for them both to balance on the rule of ‘rules get violated, captain gets the blame’.

 

She visibly shivers in her disgust at it, as they march out of the office in disgrace. “Geez, I did tell you,”

Kirk is in no mood to agree with her. He frowns shortly at her, annoyed at her, but no more than he is cross at himself. Despite what he’d want to say at her. “You told me not to file the full report. That was it. You've just seen, apparently a technicality is just a polite word for evading rules.”

“You can evade rules like crazy, Jim. And why did you leave the full version lying around? You should’ve known the Logic Machine would find it eventually.”

“Yeah, and he doesn’t get the blame for it, while I do. And I lose the Enterprise, get split up from said Logic Machine, and become one whisker away from being kicked out of Starfleet in one fell swoop.”

“It’s not Spock’s _fault_ , loverboy. He follows rules because he thinks that’s what they’re there for. I don’t know why I don’t see you doing the same.”

“ _Oh, not this again,_ ” he groans under his breath, which is enough to shut her up, before she repeats yet again what he is sick to death of hearing in moments like this, when the abrasive edges of the Vulcan and human psyche wear against each other: _Vulcans have souls too._

She leaves it for a couple of seconds, so there can be silence, to give him a chance to mull over it all, here in the corridor, leaning against the wall, his back to the room where one more chunk of his pride got bitten off. Later on, when it has taken a few hours of brewing it down, and it’s dark, and he’s sloped off to a bar somewhere on the other side of San Francisco, and he’s finally ready to let it go, she’ll calm down properly as well.

Now is the time for her to pretend to, just to temporarily keep their collective sanity intact. “He’s such a _weird_ daemon, isn’t he?” she sighs, highlighting what they’re trying to say, without being direct.

“I’m not surprised they’re all the same form. You’d think Vulcans don’t want to show the outside world that they have a soul.”

Erinys huffs. “ _I_ think it’s weird that they do the opposite of the gender thing. Y’know, a human’s daemon is usually a different gender, but a Vulcan’s daemon is normally the same gender.”

Kirk isn’t exactly listening to her. “ _Why_ , though, Erin? Why are they so… ”

The coyote-daemon cocks her head at him, as he grimaces in his flimsy attempt to articulate himself. Which is not what Kirk is about at all, but then again, he has just been severely demoted.

 

Erinys keeps a low meek profile for the next few hours, while her human melts into the city to drown the pain as it sets in, and even when Pike comes looking for him, and his presence does cheer them up, even though she stays flatly on the floor like a pet dog. She perks up once they arrive at Starfleet HQ and hear about the trouble that’s been brewing in the shadows, which they didn’t even know about, much to their unexpected distress. Kirk can see Spock on the other side of the table looking like dread personified (being told that he will be missed probably didn’t go down well), in fact everyone present looks pensive.

 

Perhaps it’s instinct, on Erinys’ part, and Kirk is first to pipe up and give a voice to the collective fear of the room, and, as an ominous red light begins to pour in from the wide windows, Kirk bears the brunt of the storm, that strikes in everyone’s faces.

The walls burst in. Fire engulfs things as if it has a will of its own. The world blurs into broken glass and screams and daemons howling in panic.

Kirk gets to see _him_ before his ship goes down. John Harrison had something disquietening about him, even from his profile picture, but somehow, in the flesh he doesn’t look any less frightening. Kirk has an impression of this tall imposing person, powerful, and monochromatic, a pale hatchet of a face with eyes as hard and brilliant as crystal, and a focus and ferocity as palpable as the fire he’d just started on the building. He nearly thinks he sees his daemon, a loop of cream-coloured scales round his neck, but his eyes might be deceiving him.

“Where’s his _daemon_?!” Erinys screeches over the chaos – it snaps Kirk out of his terrified reverie, and he forgets completely about whatever he was going to do next. Harrison disappears in a white swirl, as what’s left of his ship throws sparks and plummets from the air.

Erinys barks and barks at her madly confused human, his face going a sickly shade of greenish white, who’s just staring flat into the room… his guts have turned to ice. Did she think Harrison _didn’t have a daemon_ … how is that even possible? Who is that man who doesn’t have a daemon? That can’t be real. A man without a daemon – not just human, but any man – is no better than a man without a face. Something wrong and wicked and with absolutely no right to be in this world…

 

Erinys’ barks grow even more shrill, snapping the dizzy terror that Kirk had almost lost himself in. He gasps for air, trying to find anything real to focus on – for a long, long moment, he’s never been so happy to see her in his life. Kirk wants to drop to his knees to grab her and press her into his chest, but she’s crying out that something terrible has happened.

 

Spock is on the other side of the room, through the disarray that’s already beginning to die back down, Cassandro not on his shoulder but kneeling on the floor, his wide lanky paws carefully folded, his long grey face tucked down. Spock looks grave, his head slightly bowed, his hands resting on the shoulders of _him_ – Kirk’s gaze drops, and all the fear in the room turns into despair. Blood smeared round his mouth, it’s the lifeless body of Christopher Pike.

His wolf-daemon is already gone. Erinys whimpers, and Cassandro looks up at her, his expression too hard to read in the tiny space of time left before Kirk drops his head on Pike’s chest in tears.

The little coyote wriggles beside him, reduced to a small miserable heap of dark yellow fur; _whatever_ Harrison’s daemon is, Erinys cannot wait to close her jaws round her neck.

 

 

Spock finds himself lost for words, as he rises up onto his feet and Cassandro rolls over the floor to be lifted up to his shoulder; he wants to ask Spock something, once he’s up there, where hopefully no one else will hear.

In answer, Spock wonders for a moment before admitting, “I believe she must be a snake, or, if not, a creature that can conceal itself extremely well. Because I didn’t clearly see anything resembling a daemon with him.”

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Admiral Alexander Marcus can vouch for this. Harrison had been working on some classified work, for a special branch of Starfleet, no less, before going rogue. Marcus warns Kirk that this man is not to be taken lightly at all, unsurprising given the fact that he’s on a one-man suicide mission to take Starfleet down – and as far as Marcus is concerned, must pay up for what he’s responsible for. Even under the stern watch of Marcus’ buzzard-daemon, Erinys knows Kirk agrees with him, almost to the point of a ‘quick, painless’ elimination of Harrison by firing clean at the surface of Quo’nos: where he’s run to.

Small complication: Spock doesn’t agree with a man having to die without sitting a trial, and Scotty is not approving of classified weapons to go on board.

It’s a close enough shave already, what with the Klingons and Starfleet being on high tensions and Kirk possibly being Marcus’ only chance of dispatching with Harrison without anyone smelling a rat. Yet Scotty isn’t wrong. This isn’t what Starfleet would stand for in a million years, and Scotty doesn’t want to sacrifice it, or be around to see that happen. Erinys makes the probable mistake of growling a little too threateningly at Scotty’s skinny penguin-daemon – often, it’s the daemons, standing each other off, which can turn the direction of an argument.

 

There’s a lot of tension aboard the Enterprise in her final few minutes in Earth’s orbit before setting off.

Quite conveniently, at Scotty’s departure, arrives Dr Carol Wallace, a pretty blonde physics grad and weapons specialist with a sleek chocolate cat-daemon; several of the boys would check her out one by one during the course of the trip, but what she’s here for is something more… explosive.

 

 

 

Spock is probably the only person on the ship who isn’t visibly neurotic or edgy or deliberately, borderline excessively nice, but there is always one visible sign that Spock’s nerves are just as taut as everyone else’s – Cassandro is on the ground instead of on Spock’s shoulder. He looks ever so mildly off-balance on the floor, instead of on something to climb on. He says absolutely nothing to Spock, which seems to reflect the leap _Sophro’yn_ were never able to make, by becoming specialized to one particular lifestyle, and not having a chance to grow from it, and come up with some way of saving themselves, before it was too late.

Not that Spock needs to be reminded of that. He was ultimately responsible for saving another, younger civilization from the same sort of fate that befell Vulcan, albeit one that nature was responsible for instead of people, and that didn’t earn kudos for anyone, and meant Kirk’s neck is right on the line now.

There are presumptions, which may turn out to be untrue, but would comfort Spock, that Cassandro could tell him. Yet he cannot bring himself to do so, and he can’t bear the thought of Spock thinking he has to say that his daemon has no way of knowing what will happen in the future – and that would ruin his composure for the rest of the trip.

 

 

“Is it true?” a needle-sharp voice tensely asks, from something noiselessly fluttering beside him. It’s a fruit bat, Uhura’s daemon. “What people’re saying about Harrison’s daemon? That she can spontaneously disappear?”

Cassandro doesn’t have a clue what to say to him. Like a lot of small-sized daemons, he’s spent practically every waking moment for the past few days tucked into a soft golden-black handful of puffed fur and folded wings between her shoulder and her dark ponytail, his claws hooked into her fine red tunic.

“I cannot say, Imani. In a very short space of time a lot has been said of Harrison and his daemon, much of it I suspect isn’t true.”

“Do you know anything at all about them?”

“All Admiral Marcus has told Spock and Kirk is her name, which is Bahadi. Harrison and his work were a very sensitive subject, and information like that was guarded very carefully.”

Uhura calls for her daemon from her station, so he has to return to her. Cassandro remains sat on the floor, feeling the profound silence that reverberates through the Enterprise, as Kirk announces that Admiral Pike is dead, and that they are travelling to the Klingon native planet to arrest – arrest, instead of kill – the man responsible for the attack on Starfleet. Cassandro lets himself focus his stare on Erinys, lying loosely at the feet of the Captain’s Chair, and at the same time he can sense the worry in Spock. No doubt he cannot stop thinking of what Kirk is not saying. The foreboding secret everyone must find out about this man. His being the stuff of everyone's nightmares.


	3. Chapter 3

Thank God they find him. Well, thank whoever’s-up-there they find him. If God had anything to say on this subject, he probably wouldn’t allow people – on whatever planet they live on, or whether or not they have daemons, whatever form they take – to end up coming to such destructive ends. But of course that doesn’t mean that Dr McCoy is going to believe the crazy rumours about Harrison straightaway. Not when he’d already had enough to worry about. Treating, negotiating with, and arguing with, stubborn casualties from the firefight at Starfleet HQ, and now, with what Kirk had announced: actually landing himself and two of his second-in-commands onto the surface of Quo’nos to collect this superhuman killing machine themselves.

If they get pulverised by Klingons, don’t come to me crying. At least, that was what the Enterprise’s doctor had ‘warned’ them. In words to that effect.

 

Now they’re all back, none the wiser, by the look of them. Cassandro leaps lightly up onto Spock’s back, trying to ignore Erinys, trotting beside them with her nose edging close, making little wimpy noises, that sound like she’s being tortured by some unseen alien force, perhaps. Marten-shaped Ephial slinks up onto McCoy’s shoulder, her claws gripping tight as her human strives to keep up with Kirk, Spock following close. Once they enter the med bay, her hazel eyes sharply turn to peer oddly at Harrison, and his daemon, caged behind the glass door of his stark glass-walled cell; she is the only daemon that hasn’t seen them before. Erinys and Cassandro are keeping their heads respectfully down.

She wishes she knew why. Harrison’s ivory snake-daemon is just, there, coiled loosely on the clear white floor, as passive as _he_ is to their surroundings. He’s just standing there, close to the back of the cell, impassive, hostility simmering calmly away, eyeing them as if they’re an easy meal, in spite of the fact that it’s he who is captive.

The rumours are sounding more and more like bad dreams now.

 

“You don’t look good, Jim.” McCoy points out drily.

“I want you to run a full physio panel on our captive.”

“Why? Something wrong with him?”

“Not a clue what he is, Bones, but I do know he just took out an entire Klingon security team single-handedly. I want to know how, and don’t tell me it’s a good shooting eye.”

Both men glance warily, one at a time, at Harrison’s blank sharp coldness.

“Sounds like we have a superman on board.”

Kirk wishes badly _why_ this man is so unsullied, almost mechanical, as he’d made each kill with such inhuman precision out there. “You tell me.”

 

 

Her bushy tail curling up along McCoy’s back, Ephial makes a very light trill, which Erinys’ big ears hear, but the coyote-daemon doesn’t react beyond shuddering, her head twitching momentarily. She just can’t settle.

“ _Tell_ ‘em. _Please_ ,” she suddenly blusters.

Cassandro stiffly clenches his long bony paws against the floor. “We saw his daemon strike over three feet off the ground, aiming for the major blood vessels in the upper thigh,” he says, his long head tipped upwards as if he’s only talking to Spock.

Behind the glass, Bahadi’s scaled head slides forward, her pit-black eyes piercing, so neither Erinys nor Ephial want to look at them.

“How many times did she do that?” Ephial tensely asks.

“She made many attempts, and was successful four times.”

McCoy frowns in suspicion confirmed with alarm, Ephial’s needle-sharp claws digging in harder.

“Serpents are not uncommon forms for Earth-daemons, but a calculated efficiency like that is something only achieved by less than five per cent of the population of such individuals.” Spock continues, unflinching, even when Cassandro leans his head on him.

 

Anger, monstrous screeching anger, wells up in Kirk, as it did, after Harrison had surrendered to them, and Kirk had made what he thought was a good go at punching his lights out. He thinks of all the centuries in which serpents have been hailed as the embodiment of all evil, and this little bone-coloured snake, in Kirk’s eyes, seems to be all of that superstition condensed together. Into a daemon shaped like a snake, that has touched a person that is not her own. A gross act of violation in itself. Even if those people were Klingons.

And that is just the beginning – this daemon has struck at them, baring her fangs to pierce their skin. She would have inflicted deep crippling wounds on them. Puncturing vital blood vessels. Possibly enough to kill them.

That _never_ happens. It’s wrong beyond wrong.

Everyone knows it as instinct, disgusted at it without ever having to be told. On Earth, that wouldn’t even happen on a battlefield. The prohibition against person-daemon contact runs too deep even for that.

Bahadi looks so indifferent to this. It’s incredibly chilling.

 

 

Cassandro’s words buzz in the air like angry swarming insects, while Spock goes almost paper-white. Kirk visibly bristles, those words hitting him headlong, and Erinys whimpers. Maybe thinking of the disgusting act of her being touched by foreign hands. Even though everyone’s reasonably safe on board, and their captive is locked away from them. While Erinys is writhing in her revulsion, Cassandro just looks like he wants to calmly turn and glide away.

McCoy and Ephial, meanwhile, still have their heads on: McCoy still lives by the philosophy of see-it-to-believe-it, and he reaches across the glass panel for the irising device, opening up a window for Harrison to fit his fist through.

“Put your arm through the hole, I’m gonna take a blood sample.”

Harrison glowers at them, with a mix of contempt and self-satisfaction, as if to express how useless the glass would be as a barrier between them. He then steps forward and offers his forearm; McCoy has to dig his extractor deep into the blood vessels in his arm before the red fluid can be freed from them. His flesh feels like iron. And his white skin is completely flawless. Certainly everyone is a little intimidated, and almost bitterly envious, of this man’s lean, tightly muscled physique. The sinuous, lithe shape of his snake-daemon completes him perfectly. _Who the hell_ is _this man?!_

“Why aren’t we moving, Captain?” Harrison’s voice interrupts the tension, his deep voice made seemingly even more foreboding, without any obvious aggression. Kirk holds his tongue.

“An unexpected malfunction, perhaps, in your warp core? Conveniently stranding you on the edge of Klingon space?”

“How the hell do you kno - ”

“Bones.” Kirk cuts him off before he can finish.

“I think you’d find my insight valuable, Captain.”

McCoy gives Harrison one more derisive look, before withdrawing the extractor, curtly nodding to Kirk.

“Let me know what you find,” Kirk finishes before turning sharply to head back towards the bridge, with McCoy and Spock close at his heels, attempting to dismiss the reverberating voice of their prisoner, giving an egregious sounding “Ignore me, and _you will get everyone on this ship killed_.”

Spock promptly warns him that Harrison is not a man to engage any further, but Kirk is in no mood to restrain his temper. He waits for Spock and Cassandro to turn and leave.

Erinys shudders again, before growling, bluntly into the room – Kirk’s anger is her anger too. He turns to meet Harrison’s eyes, knowing full well that merely releasing all his ravaged emotion in crude ways will do nothing to wipe the mirthless smirk off this abhorrent man’s face. Even if he did, Spock would not want to bear witness to it – Kirk knows his first officer is right to say that all it will do is exhaust his energy, and that doesn’t do anything to stop him wanting to. Besides, Harrison can’t be a complete psychopath: he’s had to have put some serious planning, into the committing of his crimes, and also surviving on the Klingon homeland for this long without getting killed.

He and Erinys square up to their captive as best they can. “Let me explain what’s happening here, just on the off-chance you need it explaining to you. You are a c _riminal_. I’ve watched you murder innocent men and women. I was authorized to _end you_. And the _only reason_ you’re still alive is because I am allowing it. It would be well within my rights to permit Dr McCoy to inject a full measure of something suitably toxic into your bloodstream, and I’d simply be signing off the orders for the disposal of your dead body, instead of having this conversation right now. So until I decide what to do with you, you _shut your mouth_.”

Erinys scowls at Bahadi, growling that rumbling growl that normally works to intimidate smaller daemons, ones she could easily dominate, or even clasp her teeth around. It doesn’t work now. Bahadi just lays there, her slim black forked tongue slipping lazily out from her mouth.

Harrison has the impeccable nerve to make a noise of deep disappointment. “Oh, Captain, you’re going to punch me again, over and over, until your arm weakens, clearly you want to, so tell me: why did you allow me to live?”

 _Because two wrongs don’t make a right._ Kirk has a thousand different things he wants to say in answer, only a few of them probably viable.

 

“We all make mistakes. I could ask you why you surrendered. Why you saved me and my crew members from the Klingon squad. You could have killed us as well without giving us a thought.”

“No,” Harrison looks down in consideration. “I surrendered to you, because, despite your attempt to convince me otherwise, you seem to have a conscience, Mr Kirk.”

“How would _you_ know?” Erinys snaps, taking Kirk almost by surprise. “Most of the fugitives we have any experience of would still have the decency to… ”

“ _Erin. Shut it._ ” Kirk hisses. Harrison just looks flatly at her, one eyebrow raised.

“To what?” He asks, to Kirk’s face.

It nearly rocks Kirk backwards, the way he feigns this perfect knowledge of the rules people and daemons abide by. Being bitten by another person’s daemon from another world, has to be the most undignified, sickening way to die, and now, he’s acting like he doesn’t have a clue of it. Erinys finds herself completely robbed of her ability to speak. Instead she just bares her teeth in profound, unrefined fury at Bahadi.

“To use their daemon as a weapon like that. Surely even _you_ know it’s the worst thing you could do. It’s just as bad as the other way round, a person touching someone else’s daemon.” Kirk’s voice thins almost down to a terse whisper. “You think you’re above all that?!”

 

 

Then Bahadi does it. The disturbing thing everyone’s been talking about. She appears to start floating. She doesn’t move, not even flick her tongue, so she doesn’t appear to lose any of her corporal solidity – but she seems to fade from view. Like she’s halfway into a trans-warp, without the white glow. And it’s not even all down her body: her tail end clouds more obviously than any of the rest of her. The phenomenon only lasts a few seconds, so Kirk and Erinys, slack-jawed, think their eyes might be deceiving them. For Bahadi slides herself forwards, her body shifting as a loop flows through her. Immediately, she’s whole again. As if she’s just shrugging off the cloudiness.

Left unchecked, if she remained still for long enough, she would completely disappear. Of course Kirk and Erinys know nothing of that; all they know is that they saw a glimpse of her creamy scaled body, the day Harrison attacked Starfleet HQ, not enough to convince themselves she was really there. And Harrison would know to manipulate this; he simply says “One of the poorly-known side effects of cryogenic freezing on a daemon. They shouldn’t last.”

 

“What the hell d’you mean?” Kirk demands.

That shameless smirk reappears. “If you can find room in your head and heart for more than just a primitive, crude desire for simple revenge, you’d allow me to convince you of the truth. What I can tell you what you’d need to do, would not be out of keeping within your overall mission perimeters. No repercussions would come from Starfleet.”

Spock was right. This man knows what he’s talking about, and has all the ability to best him, mentally as well as physically. The tone of Harrison’s voice sounds almost familiar. It’s beguiling.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Night has fallen over San Francisco, and of course the crew of the Enterprise haven’t a clue of that. So Scotty won’t have any shame in thinking anything of them. Certainly not sat in a noisy club alternating downing shots with ranting about his present position of self-withdrawal from the crew just as they set off.

Keenser just stares across the table at him morosely as he complains indiscriminately, while Ieva resides on a perch of her human’s legs under the table, wondering what she’ll have to do or say to shut him up.

“C’mon, that’s not fair, and even if it was it’s not even true,” her husky voice pipes up.

Scotty gives her short black paddle-wing a jaunty push. “No, I think ye’re completely forgetting, it was _me_ , who’s just tryin’ to do what’s right, and then like _that_ ,” he puts down the decanter to snap his fingers, “I’m off the ship! They don’t care what I’m trying to do, and I’m tryin’ to _help_.”

Here he fixes a short incredulous look at Keenser, “And what did _you_ do? Just stand there like an oyster looking a’ me.”

A black-white closely feathered head pokes up from under the table. “Oh, don’t blame _him_.”

“What d’you mean, Ieva – _don’t blame him_?” he retorts. He’s just drunk enough to barely give what he’s saying any thought at all, and Ieva doesn’t like it. But his pocket starts buzzing before either of them can say anything else, and, rolling his eyes, Scotty fumbles around for his phone. “What?”

A familiar voice pipes up through the static. “Scotty, it’s Kirk.”

“Oh, well now! If it isn’t James Tiberius _Perfect-Hair_! Fancy you calling me at this hour, saviour o’ the universe and escutcheon o’ all the fine qualities Starfleet stands for! To what do I owe t’ pleasure?” Scotty announces with an excessive amount of delight. “Did ye hear that, I called him Perfect-Hair!” he chuckles to his daemon, who groans.

Erinys’ voice shines through. “I think he’s drunk, Jim.”

“Where are you?” Kirk briskly asks.

“Where d’you think I am? Minding my own spare time. And what I do in my spare time is my own business, Jimbo. And in case it’s escaped yer notice, I’m not a member of your crew at the moment, so I’m not subject to your orders.”

 

“Listen, I need you to find something for me. Can you take down these coordinates: 23, 17, 46, 11.”

Scotty creases into his trademark slightly-worried frown, as he considers what he’s being asked.

“You got all that?”

“Hey, hey, I’m listening, and you think I can’t memorize four numbers? Oh, ye of little faith! What was the third one?”

“Forty-six,” Kirk on the phone, and Ieva at his lap say in unison.

“Er, okay. Is there anything in particular I’m looking for?”

“I… don’t know. I think you’ll know when you see it. And I think you might be right about the torpedoes.” Scotty stifles a laugh. “I will consider that an apology. And I will consider that apology.” He has to bite down a cry of pain as Ieva’s sharp bill jabs at his thigh.

But Kirk is laughing. “Y’know you were the one who quit.”

“ _You made me quit!_ ” Scotty barks down the phone before hanging up. He downs another mouthful of spirit, and sighs “ _Enough_ of that guy. He’s obnoxious, isn’t he? I’m not doing him any favours.”

“Rubbish.” Ieva shoots right back.

“Hey! I mean it!” he accuses. “I’m not. Ach, alright, then!”

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Spock wears the self-satisfied almost-grin a little less threateningly than Harrison, but that doesn’t lessen Kirk’s annoyance when he finds out that there’s been a potential missing piece of the puzzle aboard the Enterprise all this time. It’s Carol, self-made weapons expert, and she’s Admiral Marcus’ daughter.

And for some reason Spock had decided to keep that information to himself, until ‘it became relevant’. Cassandro stoops over Spock’s shoulder as if he’s deeply bored, as the secret gets out. Erinys knows Kirk wants to get wound up over it, and, as always, reminds him there are bigger fish to fry: Harrison has told him that the key to understanding his motives is concealed inside the torpedoes he’d designed himself, before going rogue, the very same weapons Marcus had given to the Enterprise to kill him with.

One thing Kirk failed to notice during this whole wonderful business, Carol had been working with her father on these particular projects, until these torpedoes had disappeared from record. She forged her application aboard the Enterprise to find the weapons herself.

 

Alongside Dr steadiest-hands-on-the-ship McCoy, a few nerve-wracking minutes unpicking a torpedo on a nearby small planetoid later, she finds a cryo-tube under its casing.

The man inside is another of Harrison’s kind, frozen for centuries, a stowaway from a long-gone time when genetically-engineered people were bred for war.

 

 

His real name is Khan, it turns out. John Harrison is a fictional identity created when Khan, one out of seventy-three picked by Admiral Marcus, was opened from his stasis, in the hope that his superiority, both physical and intellectual, could be exploited for an edge in a militarised world of space-travel.

Khan turns the aggression up a gear when Kirk and Spock confront him, no longer composed and calculating, but now clearly showing that a nerve has been struck. Bahadi hisses sharply during a moment of cold silence. Less than a minute in, even Cassandro is close to cowering, his long dark face tilting at an uncomfortable angle. Spock won’t show he’s scared for love nor money, even though he and Kirk can both feel a shard of ice lodge deep into their guts.

“Intellect alone is _useless_ in a fight, Mr Spock, you, you can’t even break a rule. How can you be expected to break bone?”

His rockclimber-daemon crouched close, he just silently absorbs what he’s hearing; to save him from doing so himself, Cassandro reminds himself of when Spock discovered that Carol is Marcus’ daughter, and may or may not have been more help, had Spock disclosed the fact to the rest of his crew earlier. Cruelly, he knows this is the sort of thing Spock would regret. For all the differences between crew members, they are all one unit. They can’t keep secrets like that from each other for very long. But, at that time, they’d yet to catch Khan, let alone learn any of this.

Being rational is all well and good, but not even a full Vulcan would be perfect at it all the time.

And yet, when someone this dangerous, someone who speaks of a war soon to begin, had been on the loose. None of this seems fair.

 

“He sent _you_ to use those weapons, to fire my torpedoes on an unsuspecting planet. And then he purposely crippled your ship, in enemy space, and you would have _no chance of escape_.”

But while, under duress, Spock becomes granite, Kirk flares.

“ _No._ No way. I saw you open fire in a room of innocent people. You _killed them_ , in cold blood!” Something raw and painful breaks free in Kirk’s voice.

“Marcus _took my crew from me_!” Khan counters, in a voice that sounds like thunderstorms.

On either side of the glass, a coyote arches and snarls passionately, and a serpent flexes massive vicious fangs, both of them audibly angry as their humans.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Thousands of miles away, in the cockpit of their own little ship, a temporarily-suspended Starfleet engineer and his penguin-daemon gawp at the tyrannical size of _Vengeance_ , Admiral Marcus’ own ship. It’s fully twice the size of the Enterprise, with God-knows-how-much faster, not to mention the firepower, and no wonder it needs to be tucked behind Io, halfway on its orbit around Jupiter.

Ieva peers into the metallic darkness of the ship’s underbelly, her bill pointing out a place they can sneak inside unseen.

Little do they know where this very ship is due to head…


End file.
